Whenever the conversation turns to climate change, someone is sure to opine that there’s no silver bullet. The issue is simply too complex to have one solution. When you focus on all the changes that need to occur to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally it seems like a multifaceted approach is the only way forward.

Most of the world’s vexing problems share that feature. Mideast peace, nuclear non-proliferation, Eurozone stability, and plenty of other national security problems have no single right plan of attack. Some past plans might have brought us tantalizingly close to a seeming solution, but then reality started interfering once again, reconfirming the complexity of it all.

Climate change must surely be in that category. No single country, no single technology, no single approach can seemingly solve this one for us once and for all. Picking a single technology will almost inevitably end in some form of disappointment. Bureaucrats, the saying goes, ought not to try to pick winners. Leave that to venture capitalists for whom failure is a way of life. For every Apple and Facebook, there are dozens who never make it out of the garage. And clean technology doesn’t yet even have a single Apple and Facebook as the standout approach revolutionizing the field.

It turns out, though, that how you frame the issue is crucial. If you think like an engineer there are dozens of challenges. If you think like an economist, there is one. It’s guiding the ‘invisible hand’. How can you create the appropriate incentive to decrease the pollution that’s causing climate change? For that, the government need not be in the business of picking winners at all. What it should—and can—do is identify the loser that’s been clear for decades: greenhouse gas pollution. And the solution is equally clear: create incentives to reduce emissions by pricing it. If we make this one change, most other actions that are needed will follow.

That’s what the European Union has done by capping carbon emissions from its energy sector, including large industrials, covering almost half of total carbon emissions. That’s what California is doing with over 80 percent of its total global warming emissions. It’s what China is experimenting with in seven city and regional trials, including in Beijing and Shanghai. All these systems put a price on greenhouse gas pollution.

On the other side of the ledger, there are still much larger incentives to consume fossil fuels in many other countries. The International Energy Agency estimates that global subsidies are well over $500 billion. These subsidies, which incentivize emissions, sadly dwarf the paltry incentives to reduce them. Free marketeers, small government advocates, and others who dislike distorting government subsidies should be appalled at the tax money poured into fossil fuels.

There’s one simple principle that’s been around in economics for so long that no economist worth his or her degree would question the conclusion: increase the price, watch the quantity demanded go down. It’s such a universal truism that economists call it the “Law of Demand.” Generations of graduate students have estimated the effects of price on demand for anything from the generic widget to demand for car miles driven. People may be irrational at times, but one thing that we know for sure is that they respond to incentives.

Everything we know from decades of the study of human behavior would lead us to believe that carbon pollution will go down as the price on emissions increases. The only interesting question is by how much.

The prescription then for anyone seriously concerned about climate change is simple: price carbon to the point where its now unpriced damages are incorporated into the price, and get out of the way. It’s simple. It works. It’s conservative to the core.

Gernot Wagner is an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund and author of But Will the Planet Notice? (Hill & Wang/Farrar Strauss & Giroux 2011). Gernot teaches at Columbia, graduated from both Harvard and Stanford, and blogs at gwagner.com. He doesn’t eat meat, doesn’t drive, and knows full well the futility of his personal choices.

The denser the energy source, the cheaper it will intrinsically be, until the possibility of "magic machines" (such as self driving cars) doing the work of building the less dense clean energy sources for much cheaper could materialize.

We need to remove the many unnecessary layers of bullet proof shielding which seek to multiply the costs of closed cycle nuclear by many factors. We need only to tear down the walls of fear, nimbyism, Malthusianism (scientific illiteracy) so we can finally, as a global civilization, realize that political constraints are FAR more of a threat to future prosperity than any material constraints!

It seems that OTEC is the perfect solution (if cheap enough) because you can convert heat into work which displaces fossil fuels and cools the ocean. But the inefficiency requires much of the heat to simply be put in the depths. Wouldn't that be a problem considering the release of methane from methane hydrates, or even messing with ocean currents? Or are global power requirements far too trivial to even be considered in this context? (am I being too picky).

Robert as you say the efficiency does require about 20 times more heat transfered to the depths than energy created. This though I think is to OTEC's benefit considering it is surface heat that is driving storms and creating thermal expansion. At 1000 meters the coefficient of expansion of ocean water at 4C is half that of the surface.

As to methane hydrates they are found mostly in shallow waters on the continental shelf and thus are more likely to be impacted by surface heat than the movement of this heat away from where they occur.

As to the thermohaline, according to TAMU the Gulf Stream carries 40 Sv of 18°C water northward. Of this, 14 Sv return southward in the deep western boundary current at a temperature of 2°C. The flow carried by the conveyor belt must therefore lose 0.9 petawatts (1 petawatt = 1015 watt) in the north Atlantic north of 24°N.

To produce 15TW - about what we get from fossil fuels - you would move about 300 TW to the depths and most of this would occur in the Pacific, where the best conditions for OTEC and cyclones occur. I doubt therefore that the impact on this circulation would be significant.

Any problems however would become apparent long before we ever built out 15TWs worth of capacity.

As to cost, the heat pipe design reduces the size of the piping involved - the main driver for cost - from 15 meters for a 50MW unit down to 2 meters.